*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled. The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him. Thus ends the story”.
*Hal Finney quote: “How do you find someone who has spent a lifetime covering his tracks?…For some, he was a guardian angel. For others, a ghost, who never quite fit in…What’s the S stand for?”
Ray is still active on this forum as "cryddit". He's probably the best source to listen to about this subject:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=146383* Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be. Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply. Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world’s M1 money supply at that time was”.
"We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure".
Note: Satoshi is gone, I'm sure it was a little help from his friends.